Tuesday Tips & Pics - Using Layer Masks to Help Cloning

After my last link up on cloning, I got a request to write a more detailed tutorial on using layer masks to assist in cloning and painting in black and white on layer masks to erase and reveal.

So here's the image I started with.

Unfortunately a car drove behind her write as I took this picture. And the boat in the upper right corner bothered me too.



So I started by duplicating my layer by hitting Command-J (ctrl-J on a PC) and I selected my cloning tool. I held down the alt button and selected an area of ocean/sand on the left and copied it over the boat and car on the right. The boat was pretty easy to just erase but the car runs right into her sweater and it was hard to just mask over the car without covering up her sweater.



I zoomed in on my picture to try to just get the car but I couldn't help but paint over her sweater as well. And I didn't really have to worry about it because we'll get to that later.

As you can see in the circled area I cloned far too much and covered her sweater.



To fix this problem, I clicked on the layer mask button (by the bottom right arrow) and then made sure to click ON the layer mask that appeared before I starting painting. I clicked on my brush tool and selected the color black. Then I lowered the opacity of my duplicate layer so could see the line of her sweater that I had painted over so I knew what to fix. I used the black brush to paint on the layer mask over the edge of her sweater, which erased my cloning.



After I went over her sweater carefully I brought my opacity back up to 100%. In one area I painted on black a little too far over the edge of her sweater showing some of the car again. So I simply switched from black to the color white which erased my erasings. Or more simply, black to erase, and white to reveal.



When I was done I zoomed out and flattened and then did my other edits. In this case, I just ran Florabella's "Swoon" action at 25% and smoothed the skin a bit, flattened and was done!




Here's the before and after side by side!



Without the distracting background elements, the viewers attention goes straight to the subjects.

If your interested in more shots from this maternity session, check out this Preview that I posted yesterday!

Link up what you've been shooting below!